June 20, 2011

TODAY'S HIGHLIGHTS McIlroy captures history at CongressionalRory McIlroy posts the lowest mark in tournament history, shooting a final-round 69 for a total of 16-under 268, as he runs away with the 111th U.S. Open. (By Barry Svrluga)

CEO Pay: What the area’s executives makeHefty stock awards and bonuses drove total compensation up over 20 percent for Washington’s highest-paid chief executives last year, reflecting a nationwide trend among the largest public companies. (By Danielle Douglas)

STYLEAsk Amy: Words of love, uttered and ... forgotten? During a weekend outing, her boyfriend told her he loved her, would marry her “in a week” and wanted her to have his baby. The next day, he couldn’t remember what he said. Yes, there was drinking involved. (, Tribune Media Service)

Hints From Heloise: Special guest request Heloise asks: Is it fair to ask for unusual, specialty or hard-to-find food items when you are a guest in someone’s home? Readers, what do you have to say? (, King)

Calm by the green, crazed by the pitch At the U.S. Open and the Gold Cup, vastly dissimilar cultures were on display — entirely different, yet very much the same. ( by Rick Maese , The Washington Post)

FTC vs. National Gallery Republican lawmaker’s push to have the National Gallery take over the historic FTC building has sparked a turf battle in Washington. ( by Ned Martel , The Washington Post)

Sunday's Sports In Brief BETHESDA, Md. — On another brilliant day of golf, Rory McIlroy ran away with the U.S. Open title, winning by eight shots and breaking the tournament scoring record by a whopping four strokes. ( Associated Press Associated Press , AP)

WORLDReports: Japan's prime minister under pressure to resign next month TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, criticized for his handling of the tsunami disaster and the country’s sluggish economy, is under pressure to resign next month if budget bills are passed by parliament, reports said Monday. ( Associated Press Associated Press , AP)

June 03, 2011

It would take a brain far more telepathically powerful than that of Professor X to untangle what went wrong with "X-Men: First Class," but misplaced and misplayed ambition, to say nothing of a massive misspent budget, comes to my nonmutant mind. The latest edition of the sprawling action-comic-fantasy epic takes us back to the future with moments of greatness. But those flashes of amazing are fleeting, ultimately undone by a frustrating mire of multiple plots, overreaching special effects, leaden ancillary players and world-ending military standoffs that have all the tension of a water balloon fight.The film stars James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, two "First Class" standouts, as Professor X and Magneto in the '60s, when they were just a couple of mutants working through their power issues. But there is more, so much more … a back story about the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis; a subplot tied to an evil Nazi mutant (Kevin Bacon doing vile particularly well); a running teen coming-of-age bit featuring some X-Men mutant favorites; a CIA-in-conflict story; a U.S. colonel compromised by lingerie models; and a few more threads I'm probably forgetting. The stories unfold in — deep breath — Auschwitz, New York,England, Argentina, Las Vegas, Miami, Moscow, somewhere outside of Moscow, Virginia, under the ocean, in the sky, on the ground, underground, under polar icecaps and in several undisclosed locations. At times it feels like someone was playing spin and point with an old globe of the world. British director Matthew Vaughn somehow lets everything get away from him, which is unlike most of his well-calibrated early work, from his 2005 debut, "Layer Cake," to 2009's "Harry Brown," which he produced. The script is from a team whose players included Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz, and Jane Goldman and Vaughn (they collaborated on "Kick-Ass" among others). The film begins with such promise, a near perfect re-creation of the powerful Auschwitz scene that opened the original "X-Men" in 2000. It's when Magneto was a boy heartbreakingly separated from his parents at the prison gates, his metal-twisting powers unleashed, but too late to save them. We get the next terrible chapter in that book now, which introduces us to Sebastian Shaw (Bacon) as a Nazi big shot with an operating room next to his office and a persuasive gun who presses Erik into service. It plants the seeds of revenge and mistrust that will drive Erik the rest of his days. CONTINUE READING...

May 02, 2011

The Skinny: Do yourself a favor and buy a newspaper today and throw it in your closet. It will have more meaning 25 years from now than a screen grab of some blog aggregator. A slow weekend until Sunday night. Then media scrambled to cover the Bin Laden news. Then some media scrambled away as quickly as possible and back to entertainment programming. At the box office, "Fast Five" blows away the competition.

Racing to the top. Universal's "Fast Five" cruised to first place at the box office, taking in $83.6 million in the U.S. No, that's not a typo! Part of me wants to attribute the huge opening numbers to people going to see the car chase/heist flick as a goof on a weekend when there wasn't much else playing at the multiplex. If you think you had a bad prom, that was nothing compared to Disney's "Prom," which took in only $5 million in its opening weekend. The long-awaited sequel to "Hoodwinked" also flopped. Box office coverage from the Los Angeles Times, Variety and New York Times. Here's a summer preview from USA Today.

Hope they can carry a tune after all that. MTV is finally putting on "The Electric Barbarellas," a reality show about an all-female band that was championed by none other than Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone. The involvement of the almost 90 year-old Viacom chief in a show about an all-girl band was first broken by then-Daily Beast writer Peter Lauria, whose coverage of all this irritated Redstone to no end. Let's hope Lauria is having a good chuckle today. Details on the show from Variety.

NFL latest to push iPad access. The NFL Network, the league's cable channel that could be pretty dull if the labor dispute isn't solved by this summer, is talking with distributors about offering the network on iPads and other tablet devices. NFL Network is the latest programmer to want to put itself on iPads. The challenge is reworking deals with distributors so they don't risk losing subscribers. In other words, the cable guys have to be the gatekeeper to iPad access. More from the Wall Street Journal.

November 04, 2010

By Randy Myers - YOU'VE GOT to admire Tyler Perry's gumption. The popular but critically lambasted king of such melodramas as "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" and "I Can Do Bad All By Myself" deserves credit for stepping out of his success zone.

If only his filmmaking talent matched his well-intentioned ambition.

Perry confronts a daunting challenge with "For Colored Girls," an update of the 1977 Tony Award-nominated theatrical drama "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf."

No question, Perry's "Girls" is compelling and powerful. But it's also a missed opportunity, one that fails to fully capitalize on mostly terrific performances and the story's timeless message about the resiliency of black sisterhood.

The characters are portrayed by a who's who of African-American actresses. There's sassy Loretta Devine entertainingly hamming it up as big-hearted Juanita, a health-clinic do-gooder addicted to a fickle guy. Mercurial Thandie Newton is explosive as sexaholic bartender Tangie, while captivating Tessa Thompson plays her kinder, younger sister, who undergoes a horrifying medical procedure.

Kimberly Elise, so sensational in Perry's "Diary

of a Mad Black Woman," is electrifying as Crystal, a closed-off mom who unwisely stays in an abusive relationship with an alcoholic war veteran (Michael Ealy, overplaying the role). Hers is an honest and perfectly pitched performance, especially when she burrows deep into the soul of her final soliloquy.

Vivacious Anika Noni Rose is heartbreaking as dance instructor Yasmine, who gets cruelly robbed of her passion, and regal Phylicia Rashad nails the part of Gilda, the nosy but knowing building manager. Kerry Washington is radiant and convincing as Kelly, a social worker with a good man and the inability to conceive children, and trippy singer Macy Gray is frightening in the small supporting role of Rose, a drunken abortionist.

Unfortunately, two of the most recognizable stars come off as distractions. Janet Jackson channels Meryl Streep from "The Devil Wears Prada" too liberally for her icy Jo, an unhappy magazine fashion editor whose emotions are tightly boxed in because of a dishonest marriage. Jackson finally punches out of caricature in a bedroom confrontation scene that Perry makes too theatrical. Then there's Whoopi Goldberg, who never comes up with a satisfying tone for Alice, a disturbed religious zealot with questionable motives. Goldberg treads too lightly at the start, making Alice humorously eccentric.

It's places like this where we see Perry's weakness as a director. In telling their stories, Perry shoots more for soap opera than drama, an approach that denies "Girls" its full measure of grit, a crucial element given the circumstances facing the characters.

Explicit scenes

In a departure from his previous films, Perry also gives "Girls" a more serrated edge -- including an explicit, overly long rape scene and a sequence in which children's lives are imperiled. But these are choppily executed; the violent sexual violation is ineffectively intercut with an opera.

So instead of making us weep -- which we should -- we become distracted by the overly symbolic wardrobe, the cold color scheme in Jackson's character's apartment and the Adonis physiques of shirt-challenged male actors. The stagy sets don't help much, either, making us feel emotionally disconnected from it.

Provocative art like this requires tremendous finesse, someone who can mix subtlety with the toughness. Watching these characters survive tragic events, you can't help but wonder what a more visceral and polished director such as Lee Daniels ("Precious") might have accomplished.

December 17, 2009

By MANOHLA DARGIS ~ With “Avatar”James Cameron
has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about
the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several
decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making,
the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with
software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the
spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created
to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the
movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump —
is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to
top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the
medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven
by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a
visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed
the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,”“Aliens” and “The Abyss”),
is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories
to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic
ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW. CONTINUE READING...

October 28, 2009

Even in death, Michael Jackson looks poised to break records. With
online ticket retailers swamped and lines snaking through theater
lobbies and down city blocks, moviegoers geared up for the much
anticipated 'This Is It,' a record of MJ's final days as he rehearsed the titular concert spectacle that would never be.

Between the film's limited two-week run and a legion of devoted fans
still grieving his sudden death four months ago, curiosity has been
high about the two-hour documentary, in which MJ performs some of his
most beloved songs, as well as new material set to signature dance
moves.

Given that Sony Pictures has already recouped its initial $60M
investment in advance ticket sales and that the film earned early
critical praise after a 12-minute preview last week, it's time to ask:
Does 'This is It' live up to the hype as well as honor Jackson's
memory?

One fan who attended the premiere reported, "This movie reminds you why
Michael Jackson was the King of Pop. And double bonus: 'Thriller' in
3D!" TWITTER YOUR THOUGHTS

September 26, 2009

(CNN) -- Remember! Remember! Remember! Remember! Yes, "Fame" is back, nearly 30 years after Alan Parker's movie dragged the MGM musical kicking and screaming into the 1980s.The 2009 edition retains the name and even the logo but sheepishly holds the naked ambition of the Academy Award-winning title track back until the end credits. Success comes in many forms, we're piously informed: in doing something that makes you want to leap out of bed in the morning, in finding friendship and love ... but not necessarily in, you know, money, adulation and immortality.

That may be true, but they didn't call the movie "Contentment."

Still, it's easy to imagine why someone figured the time was right for another term at New York's High School of the Performing Arts. Preteens have embraced Disney's "High School Musical" moppets, and our top-rated TV shows all seem to be variations on "American Idol." "Fame" presents the same playbook: talent show auditions and party pieces, criticism and approbation, interspersed with just enough offstage information to give us a rooting interest in individual students' success and failure. But there's really nothing here that you can't see on the reality shows for free. The original film's screenwriter, Christopher Gore, first conceived of "Fame" as a TV series -- it materialized in the wake of the film's success and ran for four seasons, 1982-86 -- and presumably that's the goal this time too. Allison Burnett's screenplay follows Gore's template, beginning with a new round of candidates trying out for the school and then following them through four years of heavily truncated life lessons. Director Kevin Tancharoen, a veteran of Britney Spears' Onyx Hotel tour, also reprises some of the more memorable vignettes from Parker's film -- a brush with the casting couch; a close call with a subway car -- invariably to lesser effect.

Substituting a PG rating for the original's R, the new movie has rounded off the rough and the raw, but all the handheld camera work in the world can't make it feel real. There is talent here. The standouts are the singers: Naturi Naughton has a big voice and is plausibly cast as a potential star in the Alicia Keys mold. Asher Book has the smile of a teen idol and the pipes of James Blunt. But if you're looking for personality, the faculty dominates with minimal expenditure of effort. The staff includes "Fame" alumni Debbie Allen as Principal Simms, Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammer and Bebe Neuwirth. Sadly, the latter two -- TV's Frasier and Lilith -- aren't on screen together. The young cast sing, they dance, and they act their socks off, but simple human interaction seems beyond most of them. It doesn't help that the dramatic scenes are so clichéd they might as well be acting exercises, but if there's a future De Niro here or a budding Streep, I must have blinked. SOURCE:CNN.COM

December 25, 2008

EXCERPT FROM NYTIMES -- “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which occupies around 25 pages in the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
is a slender piece of whimsy, a charming fantasy about a man who ages
in reverse, descending through the years from newborn senescence to
terminal infancy. As Fitzgerald unravels it, Benjamin’s story serves as
the pretext for some amusing, fairly superficial observations about
child rearing, undergraduate behavior and courtship in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. From this odd, somewhat unpromising kernel, the director David Fincher
and the screenwriter Eric Roth have cultivated a lush, romantic
hothouse bloom, a film that shares only a title and a basic premise
with its literary source. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” more
than two and a half hours long, sighs with longing and simmers with
intrigue while investigating the philosophical conundrums and emotional
paradoxes of its protagonist’s condition in a spirit that owes more to Jorge Luis Borges than to Fitzgerald. While the film’s plot progresses, with a few divagations, in
a straight line through the decades of Benjamin Button’s life, the
backward vector of that biography turns this “Curious Case” into a
genuine mystery. And the puzzles it invites us to contemplate — in
consistently interesting, if not always dramatically satisfying ways —
are deep and imposing, concerning the passage of time, the elusiveness
of experience and the Janus-faced nature of love. Above all, though, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a triumph of technique. Building on the advances of pioneers like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Robert Zemeckis — and on his own previous work adapting newfangled means to traditional cinematic ends — Mr. Fincher (“Fight Club,”“Zodiac”) has added a dimension of delicacy and grace to digital filmmaking. While it stands on the shoulders of breakthroughs like “Minority Report,”“The Lord of the Rings” and “Forrest Gump”
(for which Mr. Roth wrote the screenplay), “Benjamin Button” may be the
most dazzling such hybrid yet, precisely because it is the subtlest.
While he does treat the audience to a few grand, special-effect
showpieces, Mr. Fincher concentrates his ingenuity on the setting and
the characters, in particular — and most arrestingly — on the faces of
his stars, Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. Ms. Blanchett is Daisy, a dancer, bohemian and all-around
free spirit who ages gracefully, before our eyes, into a stately modern
matron and then into a wasted, breathless old woman. Mr. Pitt, for the
most part, plays Benjamin, who is born, looking like a man in his 70s,
into a prominent New Orleans family in 1918. I say for the most part
because near the end of the movie Mr. Pitt is replaced by younger and
younger children and also because, at the beginning, he is evoked by an
uncanny computer-generated confection that seems to have been distilled
from his essence. This creature, tiny and wizened, is at once boy and
man, but in every scene the ratio is readjusted, until the strapping
figure of a familiar movie star emerges, gradually and all but
imperceptibly.CONTINUE READING...

December 19, 2008

EXCERPT FROM SFGATE.COM -- Will Smith is interested in emotional pain now, in the dark side of
American life, in people who are sad or sick or just plain unlucky, and
he's found a partner in the Italian director Gabriele Muccino. The team
collaborated on "Pursuit of Happyness," a 2006 film that told the true
gutter-to-riches story of a brilliant, talented man who still almost
fell through society's cracks. Their new film, "Seven Pounds," is a
spiritual successor to "Pursuit," but darker and more oblique. In fact, the movie is so roundabout and cryptic that it takes half
the running time just to figure out the general nature of what's going
on. "Seven Pounds" makes a mystery of its lead character and of what
he's pursuing, and for a very simple reason: If the movie were to
announce its subject and story in the usual straightforward way, it
would seem so ridiculous, far-fetched and borderline distasteful that
no one would want to watch it. It might even seem funny. So Muccino's task is clear, if difficult - to generate enough magic
and to work up just the right mood so as to cast a spell on viewers.
That way, when the movie's intentions and meaning are finally made
clear, nothing will seem discordant or strange. All will make sense.
For the most part, Muccino accomplishes this precise balance that Grant
Neoporte's screenplay requires. Going in, all we know about Ben (Smith) is that something terrible
has happened in his past, and that he feels responsible for it. That's
all. Everything else we gradually piece together, through a fractured
narrative that jumbles the time sequence. We learn that he is an IRS
agent. Later, we see that he does field audits, but audits of a very
particular and repugnant kind. He seems to specialize in hounding
people for back taxes when they're in the hospital, sometimes with
serious illnesses. There's anger in this guy. In one scene, he talks on the phone to a
food company's customer service representative (Woody Harrelson), and
when he finds out the man is blind, he goes ballistic and starts
taunting him, making withering, demeaning remarks and shouting into the
phone. Obviously, this is not the usual Will Smith, and that difference
is half the appeal of "Seven Pounds," to see a familiar screen presence
show new sides of himself. Smith has made a point of stretching in recent years. Even in the
title role of "Hancock," which was in most ways a routine action movie,
Smith had to build a character different from his usual rambunctious
action persona, tapping into reserves of sorrow and disillusionment.
But he goes much further in "Seven Pounds." His breeziness becomes a
shallow act, and his smile becomes downright eerie, a strained mask
that hides pain, wards off hostility and expresses aggression all at
the same time. It's a smile with dead eyes. Throughout, "Seven Pounds" has a distinct quality. The pensive
score, the subjective cinematography and even the muted aspect of the
featured performances all contribute to a sense of being trapped inside
a waking dream, or nightmare. Ben leads a hollow existence, a death in
life, and the people with whom he comes into contact are the forgotten,
who have dropped out of the world. CONTINUE READING

November 15, 2008

EXCERPT FROM NYTIMES By A. O. SCOTT -- A reviewer may come to a new James Bond movie — “Quantum of Solace,” directed by Marc Forster
and opening Friday, is the 22nd official installment of the series in
46 years — with a nifty theory or an elaborate sociocultural
hermeneutic agenda, but the most important thing to have on hand is a
checklist. It’s all well and good to reflect upon the ways 007, the Harry Potter of British intelligence, has evolved over time through changes in casting, geopolitics, sexual mores and styles of dress.But the first order of business must always be to run through the
basic specs of this classic entertainment machine’s latest model and
see how it measures up.So before we proceed to any consideration of the deeper
meanings of “Quantum of Solace” (or for that matter the plain meaning
of its enigmatic title), we need to assess the action, the villain, the
gadgets, the babes and the other standard features.The opening song, performed by Jack White and Alicia Keys
(an intriguing duo on paper if nowhere else), is an abysmal cacophony
of incompatible musical idioms, and the title sequence over which those
idioms do squalling battle is similarly disharmonious: conceptually
clever and visually grating. The first chase, picking up exactly where
the 2006 “Casino Royale”
left off, is speedy and thrilling, but the other action set-pieces are
a decidedly mixed bag, with a few crisp footraces, some semi-coherent
punch-outs and a dreadful boat pileup that brings back painful memories
of the invisible car Pierce Brosnan tooled around in a few movies ago.Picturesque locales? Bolivia, Haiti, Austria and Italy are
featured or impersonated, to perfectly nice touristic effect. Gizmos? A
bit disappointing, to tell the truth. Technological advances in the
real world may not quite have outpaced those in the Bond universe, but
so many movies these days show off their global video surveillance
set-ups and advanced smart-phone applications that it’s hard for this
one to distinguish itself.What about the villain? One of the best in a while, I’d say, thanks to a lizardy turn from the great French actor Mathieu Amalric,
who plays Dominic Greene, a ruthless economic predator disguised as an
ecological do-gooder. The supporting cast is studded with equally
excellent performers, including Jeffrey Wright and Giancarlo Giannini, both reprising their roles in “Casino Royale.”And the women? There are two, as usual — not counting Judi Dench,
returning as the brisk and impatient M — one (Gemma Arterton) a doomed
casual plaything, the other a more serious dramatic foil and potential
romantic interest. That one, called Camille, is played by Olga
Kurylenko, whose specialty seems to be appearing in action pictures as
the pouty, sexy sidekick of a brooding, vengeful hero. Not only Daniel
Craig’s Bond, but also Mark Wahlberg’s Max Payne and Timothy Olyphant’s Hitman.CONTINUE READING...

October 09, 2008

Guy Ritchie reshuffles a worn-out deck in “RocknRolla,” a return to the shady stylings that characterized his earlier flicks “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch.”
The on-screen names have changed, and the edited rhythms have been
somewhat slowed, but more or less everything else follows formula: pump
up the volume, tilt the camera, flex the muscle, strut the stuff, bang
bang, blah blah.There are the usual villains with funny names — a nice-and-easy Gerard Butler
plays One Two, while the underdeployed Idris Elba plays his partner in
London crime, Mumbles — committing the usual villainy while spouting
the usual argot. There’s the big, bad boss, Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson),
a thug in bespoke pinstripes who comes with an iron fist in a velvet
glove called Archy (Mark Strong). There are drugs and a rock ’n’ roll
druggie, Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell). There’s the requisite femme fatale
in stilettos, Stella (Thandie Newton),
and the de rigueur scary, scarily rich Russian, Uri (Karel Roden).
There are double-crosses and right hooks and ha-ha scenes of grim
torture that come with throbbing musical accompaniment. It isn’t all bad — many of the lads look lovely, and there’s
a chase sequence that nicely devolves into an impressionistic blur of
herky-jerky faces — but there isn’t much to chew on or mull over. The
violence is idiotic and brutal (the story is just idiotic), but it’s
also so noncommittal that it doesn’t offend. Like the filmmaking
itself, the violence has no passion, no oomph, no sense of real or even
feigned purpose. For Mr. Ritchie, a man who clearly appreciates fine
tailoring (and kudos to the costume designer, Suzie Harman), a fist in
the mouth or a bullet in the head is just a stylistic flourish, some
flash to tart up the genre clichés he never seems to have bought in the
first place.But that’s the thing about genre clichés: you need to
believe in them before you can twist, upend or abandon them. To judge
from his crime flicks, Mr. Ritchie seems to have gravitated to the
underworld primarily because of some misbegotten and vague sense of
cool. The history of real and imaginary British crime certainly gives
him fodder, including the real East End criminals the Kray twins (who
were put out of nasty business in 1968, the year Mr. Ritchie was born)
and the nattily dressed, lethally armed Michael Caine in Mike Hodges’s vicious “Get Carter”
(1971). American criminals have the bigger guns, but the Brits lock and
load like dandies, a fact that, more than any other, seems to have
shaped Mr. Ritchie’s oeuvre.SOURCE:NYT.COM

September 26, 2008

Spike Lee has been waiting to make a war film for the longest time.
Having seen few Blacks or none at all in past war films only increased
his desire to get it done. There are plenty of stories from black
soldiers who fought in World War II that haven't been told and some of
these guys were in the front and center of it. With funding coming
outside of the studio system, Lee set out on telling a story based on
the novel from author/ screenwriter James McBride, 'Miracle at St.
Anna'.The cast includes Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson
Miller, Matteo Sciabordi, John Leguizamo, Joseph Gordon Levitt,
Valentina Cervi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Michael K. Williams, and Kerry
Washington.While the film does highlight Blacks and Latinos in the war,
specifically the Buffalo Soldiers, the direction that Lee took to make
the film was jagged. At the end of this nearly three hour movie, what
you have is a noble attempt thwarted by uneven artistic choices. It's
the 1980s and we have an elderly postal clerk (Alonso) watching the
John Wayne film, 'The Longest Day', in which he mutters to himself, 'We
were there too.' We then see the clerk working in the post office when
another elderly man steps in front of his booth looking to buy stamps.
Suddenly the clerk pulls out his service revolver and shoots him dead
after recognizing him. Taken into police custody without uttering a
word for the shooting, a journalist (Gordon-Levitt) is let in to get
his side of the story. While the cops are searching his apartment for
any evidence, they discover a statue that apparently was stolen from
Rome during WWII. The postal clerk then decides to tell his story to
the reporter about the statue and how he ended up with it. It all began
40 years ago. CONTINUE READING...

June 01, 2008

SPOILER ALERT! CLICK AWAY NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW ANY PLOT DETAILS FROM THE SEX AND THE CITY MOVIE! As a Darren Star series on HBO, Sex and the City
may have come in tidy half hours, but what those sparkling and fizzy
episodes added up to, in spirit, was the great chick flick of our time.
The show was that rare thing, a fairy tale you could believe in. Carrie
Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the lovelorn single-girl newspaper columnist, and her devoted trio of BFFs — randy Samantha (Kim Cattrall), wide-eyed Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and neurotic taskmaster Miranda (Cynthia Nixon)
— all took the fruits of feminism for granted: independence, equality,
the right to sleep around, etc. Yet what they found was a new kind of
liberation. High on their pink drinks and showpiece handbags, literally
high on their designer heels (and on the prospect of turning the search
for a mate into another form of shopping), they embraced the holy right
to be cosmetic, acquisitive, and — yes! — superficial. If Carrie's
desire for love had an element that was undeniably...aspirational, what of it? Wasn't that true of Jane Austen's heroines? The glory of Sex and the City is that it turned the cosmopolitan high life of girls who just want to have fun into a new feminine mystique. The movie version of Sex and the City,
written and directed by Michael Patrick King (always the show's
savviest writer), is 2 hours and 22 minutes of love, tears, fashion,
depression, lavish vacation, good sex, bad sex, and supreme tenderness.
It's as long as five series episodes, a big sweet tasty layer cake
stuffed with zingers and soul and dirty-down verve (it's not above
having one of the girls poop her pants). Given the running time,
though, not that much happens, and what does has several shades more gravitas. That's as it should be. We want Sex and the City
on the big screen to be true to the show yet to feel more like a movie.
And it does. Now that Carrie and her crew have left the bittersweet
college of cosmo hedonism, the film treats them, shrewdly, as cynical
wised-up fortysomethings facing life on the other side of the adult
divide. The movie is about the situations Carrie can't just write off
with a quip. SOURCE:EW.COM

April 10, 2008

Police corruption is roasted over an open fire in "Street Kings," the
latest motion picture to look into the black heart of the LAPD and come
out confused, covered in blood, and gasping for air. Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) is a burned-out, alcoholic vice cop who
specializes in bending the law to suit his crime-solving needs. Under
the care of Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), Tom's sins have been
covered up for years, keeping him tight with his fellow officers
(including Jay Mohr and John Corbett) and allowing him a lawless
existence that's turned into a prison. Now, when his former partner-turned-informant (Terry Crews) is killed in a vicious
convenience store attack, it instills Tom with a newfound twitch of
moral fortitude, and he sets off to hunt for the killers with the help
of a young detective (Chris Evans) who's eager to partake in a
clandestine investigation. The screenplay, credited to three writers including the great
James Ellroy, is a juicy selection of intrigue and paranoia, placing
Tom in the middle of a tornado of evidence tampering, the attention of
internal affairs, and his own self-loathing, which has thickened his
skin to such a degree that he barely comprehends injustice anymore. The
script is ripe with tongue-twisting dialogue and rotating motivations,
and it's too much for Ayer to handle at times. Outside of the fact that
giving Reeves platefuls of complex technical language is a mistake
(he's a fine actor, but needs to be wielded carefully or his
limitations are revealed quickly), "Kings" doesn't know how to unwind
itself; it prefers an excruciating "Bond villain" explanation in the
third act to untangle the complex plot, severely undercutting the
labyrinthine structure of the earlier scenes. By the end of "Kings," Ayer hands the material over to operatic
sways of spastic melodramatic acting (I think Whitaker is convinced
he's in a silent film) and semi-believable turns of logic. The network
of corruption that "Kings" itemizes is compelling groundwork for
something more intellectually explosive than the action film clichés of
the final stretch, and the film loses much of its zest when Ayer
scrounges for an ending that can both satisfy and stimulate. SOURCE OF THIS STORY

March 28, 2008

Filmmaker Daphne Valerius takes a stark look at the
relationship between media images and the self-esteem of African
American women in her moving documentary The Souls of Black Girls.
Here, she shares the purpose behind her passion, and thoughts on what
it takes for us all to start loving what we see in the mirror.Q: What made you name your film, The Souls of Black Girls?
The title “The Souls of Black Girls” derives from the seminal book by
W.E.B Dubois “The Souls of Black Folks” where he discusses the
double-consciousness condition where there is a duality of being a
Negro and an American in the United States. I was inspired and
intrigued by this concept when I was first introduced to it and I was
inspired to name my piece, The Souls of Black Girls because I attempt
to expand upon the duality of people of color but I wanted to include
gender within that very same concept presented by Dubois. So I’ve
chosen to expand on the idea that as Black women we have a “triple
consciousness” condition where we have to be a Negro, a woman and an
American and within that identity we also struggle to define our own
standard of beauty.Q: When did you find that film making could be your “voice” to speak out or express yourself?
This piece was done as a journalistic broadcast piece and so when given
the opportunity to focus and concentrate on one area to develop my
final master’s thesis I chose to focus on this topic and issue building
upon research that I conducted as a Ronald McNair Scholar on this very
same topic. So I found my “voice” by during my studies as a graduate
student of Broadcast Journalism at Emerson College.Q: A documentary of this poignancy is much needed in today’s
oversaturated culture of bling and booty. When did you get to the point
where you decided to do something about what we see on the screen and
in the magazines?
This piece actually came about as a result of my own insecurities
growing up as a young black girl in our culture and society. For me I
was always very much “into” media images and entertainment as an
aspiring performer but I always felt very much invisible and uncertain
of myself as a result of not seeing a reflection of those who look like
me in magazines, advertisements, or television and of the women of
color that looked like me there were few. And in my youth I can say
that I felt very much like Pecola Breedlove of Toni Morrison’s “The
Bluest Eye” to a certain degree. So for me in putting together this
documentary, it was very much a selfish exploration of my own feelings
and understanding how and why I was influenced by media images. But
also realizing that this can’t just be me and so as I was in search of
trying to answer these questions of myself I was also hoping to foster
open and honest dialogue among women because I knew it wasn’t just “me.”Q: The documentary includes interviews from some of the most
intelligent and passionate voices of our community; most
importantly—voices that work directly in the media in some form (film,
print, television, etc). How did you decide on who all to include
and/or interview?
I can honestly say that God decided for me who would be included in
this piece. But it also came as a result of relationships that I had
built over the years. Chuck D was the very first individual attached to
this piece. I had a relationship with both Chuck D and Regina King
prior to me putting together this piece and so I simply asked if they
would be interested in being a part of this piece and God took care of
the rest. SOURCE OF THIS STORY

March 08, 2008

BC' is a terribly outdated way to classify periods of time, it was
replaced by BCE, to denote "before common era" and AD was replaced by
CE (meaning "common era"), these changes were made specifically to
remove religious references, and Jesus and science are simply
incompatible. None of this phased Roland Emmerich, with his latest
film, '10,000 BC', which could best be described as a lame re-imagining
of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. It covers much of the same ground, but is
set much further in the past, and does not quite pay as much attention
to authenticity. Take, for instance, the fact that out of the tribes of
cavemen we see here, some speak English and some don't. The special
effects are not even that impressive, despite the large budget. The
Mammoths and Sabertooth Tigers were actually rendered much more
convincingly in Ice Age with computer animation. I half expected to see
dinosaurs lumbering about, even though they had been extinct for
millions of years; that is one detail Emmerich got right. Humans were
still in the early stages of evolution, up against hostile environments
and more imposing mammalian creatures that outweighed them by several
tons. The mammoth, for its parts, was pretty much harmless, unless you
make them mad, like a furry elephant really. The main character, D'Leh (Steven Strait) hunts mammoths, and tries to
deal with the stigma of being the child of a coward, since his father
left the tribe when he was a boy. D'Leh will eventually emerge as the
leader of his tribe, its strongest warrior, but he will have to
overcome the trial of rescuing his love, Evolet (Camilla Belle), from
those who have taken her, as both slave and sacrifice, which will of
course prove his worth, and show his willingness to avenge the tribe
after its village has been attacked and plundered. There are some
battle sequences, the best one probably with the Sabertooth, but there
also groups of human enemies to beat up, as well, slice and dice
perhaps, but the camera constantly cuts away so as to safeguard the
PG-13 rating by not showing much in the way of gore. A few severed
limbs here and there would not have been so bad. The movie runs out of steam rather early, becomes long-winded and
tedious, largely because it takes itself a bit too seriously and does
not contain enough action. The romantic aspects of the story are not
explored too deeply, and we can all be grateful for that. Strait
provides a superficial and forgettable hero, but he does display his
chest a lot, which may be a plus. Some of the buildings here look like
they were inspired by Mayan and Egyptian architecture, which is
strange, but then temples are always more elaborate than anything else
in ancient civilizations. The cinematography does have its moments,
accentuating the natural beauty of the various settings, which include
deserts and rain forests, habitats that are not usually that close
together, so I wonder where exactly these events are supposed to have
occurred. SOURCE OF THIS STORY

February 14, 2008

The latest Martin Lawrence vehicle, the crude and intermittently humorous Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, is like Big Momma's House
without the drag. Lawrence has an easy screen presence and his reactive
facial expressions can be fun—but only when the material matches and
that is rarely the case. The racial inside joke-driven Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins,
laden with the N word, is not an exception. Neither too gross nor too
slaphappy, this all-star pap is a purely predictable waste of talent,
including Lawrence's and those of actors such as James Earl Jones
(unforgettable in Martin Ritt's The Great White Hope) and Margaret Avery (one of the best things about Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple).
Sometimes it seems like Hollywood studios won't be content until every
credible actor has been reduced to a humiliating comic flashback. Here, Lawrence plays the title character, a
successful talk show host who returns to his hometown in the South with
his son and his girlfriend. Anyone who's seen Sweet Home Alabama knows that Roscoe will rediscover traditionalist values before the gag credits roll and, frankly, that's another drawback.The values, as set down here, are neither
constructive nor situationally comical. Nothing wrong with mocking
sanctimonious vegetarianism, as this does in a scene with
finger-lickin' ribs, but their flaws are presented as superior to
Roscoe's health-conscious choices (he's in decent shape, unlike his
predominantly overweight family). Some cultural jokes work, mostly in
the hands of a brother named Reggie, played with good timing by Mike
Epps, playing a wisecracker as usual. SOURCE OF THIS REVIEW

September 2012

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